Upstream
by WolfAtSea
Summary: Jake is up to something. Charlie is incorrigible. The reluctant partners were unmatched until a rogue sect of Rowan's own captured Charlie and got personal with the OPA. (i.e.: I decided to depict the beginning of a beautiful friendship between two psychopaths.)
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I don't own _Scandal_. If the show'd been mine, certain characters would've been killed off long ago. See if I can fix that here.

* * *

 _ **Prologue**_

Liv shot me one last look fit to kill before storming off. I turned and glared at my unwilling houseguest.

"What?" I spat out. Charlie was starring at me with a clinical interest as I locked the door, and I had a feeling he'd watched the whole conversation in this way too. It was unnerving. "I _was_ working. I _am_ working." I sighed. "She can't know any of this."

"Sure." He drawled lazily, unmoving from his seat on my couch. "When can I get these off?"

"When you're done making a run for it."

"It was worth a shot." He bristled. "And I almost made it."

"No, you didn't." I refuted, throwing the keys at him with a little more force than was strictly necessary. He didn't even try to catch it.

"Now if you make a move, I'll kill you." I warned as he patiently worked through the keys before he found the right one.

"Are you sure you can manage that?"

"I've come out top several times now."

Charlie appeared nonchalant. "Well. You're taller; I'll give you that. And younger too, but that could go both ways." He moved on to the next key. "You're so confident, so self-righteous…" Another key. Click. "If I were you, I wouldn't be so sure." He finished as he finally unlocked the cuffs, tossing them to the coffee table with a content sigh. "So where do we start, _boss_?"

I laid out a handful of profile photos. Charlie turned serious. "That's… that's Team 107. They're all long dead."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. It was seven years ago. In Beirut, wasn't it."

I handed over a freeze-frame from a surveillance video and watched Charlie grow still. "No way…" The photo showed a man in his early forties looking straight up at the camera. The location was the intersection closest to the B613 headquarters. In appearance the man was unassuming, but the way his eyes glinted – we both knew what he was after. The time stamp in the lower right corner dated the photo to be taken a week ago.

"The rest of his team are here too. Sighted all over DC during the past week."

Charlie's gaze was still fixed on the photo he held in his hand. "Oh snap."


	2. 1 Taken

**Chapter 1: Taken**

* * *

There is never a lack of excitement in the halls of Olivia Pope & Associates. I've long been accused of adding to that excitement unnecessarily. As I walked into the conference room, they were all huddled around Huck's computer. "I need help." I said, loudly so those good little gladiators could hear me above their chatter. Only three of them, actually. The ranks of OPA have grown a little thin lately.

"Jake!" Quinn, or Agent Perkins, or Lindsay, or the Molotov Mistress, or whatever she goes by now – I believe Superfreak was one of them – exclaimed. "What happened to you?"

I ignored her questions, and stated impassively: "I need help. Somebody took Charlie." I looked for changes in Quinn's expression; there was none. I sometimes forget that we're all spies.

"Who?" Marcus was all innocent bewilderment.

"Oh, Charlie – just a psychotic murderer/assassin who used to be Huck's mentor," – Huck's face was stony as always – "who was, or is, Quinn's friend with benefits," – still no reactions from her, damn – "and who happens to have been working with me for the past month or so." That summed it all up nicely. "He knows stuff, I need him back, and I would appreciate your help."

A long moment of silence. Awkward.

"Okay." Quinn nodded. "Huck?" As if asking for approval. Marcus still looked confused.

"Okay." Huck echoed. "What do you need?"

* * *

Twenty minutes later, we were all settled in my living room. The three flat screens were all fired up with surveillance footage from Charlie's apartment, covering three rooms with six different angles. Huck was fiddling with his computer while I fast-forwarded the video with the remote.

"So let me get this straight…" Marcus said thoughtfully, no trace of sarcasm in his voice. "You have a live video feed of your boyfriend's apartment?"

"Charlie's not my… Ew. No."

"Spying on your partner? That's even more of a jackass move." Quinn countered.

"Whatever." I glared at her, feigning petulance. "I trust that slimy little bastard as far as I can throw him." I stopped the video at the right spot. "There. 9:14 am." The middle screen showed Charlie seated on his couch, scrabbling something down furiously on a piece of paper with one hand and scrolling on his phone with the other.

"He's up to something." Quinn looked at me. "The question is: what?"

"I have no ides. Honest." I said, "Now the doorbell rings. He's expecting me – I told him I'd be there at quarter past." Charlie rolled up the piece of paper and tossed it into the wastebasket. Pocketing his phone, Charlie peeped through the hole and then opened the door, revealing a man of medium build in a baseball cap. They seemed to be talking quite normally although we couldn't see their faces.

"I wish I'd set up sound." I lamented.

"He must know this guy." Quinn concluded, "Huck, do you?"

Huck shook his head. "No. I don't think so."

The two people on screen kept on with the conversation, until Charlie suddenly raised his hands and stepped backwards. The stranger lurched forward and went for his throat, but Charlie quickly threw him off.

"And then reinforcement showed up." I continued with the running commentary as two burley men appeared in the doorway. They were wearing black masks. Charlie reached into his jacket with his right hand.

"He's reaching for his gun, understandably. No, wait…"

"Charlie doesn't carry a gun around at home." Quinn interjected. "That is… his phone in his hand. Why…" She sounded bewildered. I was too.

One of these bodyguard types fired his gun once. Charlie was sent crashing hard to the ground, and they advanced. Baseball cap disappeared on the centre screen and showed up on the feed for the bedroom.

"He's looking for something." I said. "Now this is where I came in. 9:17 am; I was a little late." We saw myself freezing at the door, the messenger bag I was carrying dropping to the ground as I took in what was going on.

"Here I managed to take out one of the masks. The second one almost had me, but I held my own and yelled for Charlie. He shouted back he was okay although he really wasn't." It was a funny experience, reliving a fight on screen. At this point, Charlie had found cover behind the couch, and he was doing something on his phone.

"What's he doing here? Calling someone?"

"No. Probably sending a message."

"Or an email?" Marcus ventured.

"On it." Quinn reached for her own laptop.

"Why isn't he getting his gun or something? He knows the first man's still around…" Marcus wondered out loud.

"Because whatever he's doing with his phone is more important." Huck stated. More important than life and death, I thought grimly as I watched my opponent gift with the bruises I now wore on my face. Then I saw myself take out the guy with one lucky punch and rushed over to Charlie.

"He's got the bullet between his ribs, I think, and he was holding up alright." I leaned in to examine the wound, but Charlie pushed me away, and proceeded to smash his phone repeatedly as hard as he could. "He was quite frantic, going on about 'can't let them have it', and 'a third man'. Now I know what he was talking about." I smiled sardonically, "It all happened too fast."

On screen, the man with the baseball cap returned to the living room. I watched him stick a needle in my neck and myself slip into unconsciousness. Charlie was shouting something. He put up a somewhat spirited resistance before the stranger gave him the needle too. By this time, the first guy I downed had come to, and helped the first man drag Charlie out into the hall before coming back for his accomplice.

"So they took him." Quinn breathed, her fingers frozen on her keyboard. "Just like that."

"Just like that." I sighed.

"So baseball cap has the phone. Look here. He pocketed it after drugging Charlie." Huck pointed out. "I can try tracing it but it's probably quite dead."

"Can you trace the hardware… the chip, or something?"

"I can try."

"Good." I said. "When I woke up, they were long gone. I don't know how they transported two unconscious men out of the area – we'd need the traffic cams for that."

"I'm on it, and Huck won't you run facial recognition on baseball cap." Quinn said crisply. I offered her my laptop to work with. For a while there was silence save for four hands clicking madly on keyboards.

Marcus coughed. "Guys. Uh, I take it no one is calling 911?" He was met with three resounding "no"s.

"Okay, okay, I'm just saying." He raised his hands in defeat. "Look, I don't know much about this secret spy stuff but, your friend there? He's hurt pretty bad. And unless whoever took him wanted money, I can't see… Well, he's probably…" He's probably already dead. Marcus trailed off, but none of us was naïve. Huck stopped typing. Quinn looked up from the screens; her expression was cold and focused but her eyes were burning.

"We keep looking." I said.

Marcus sighed. "We keep looking. Now why don't I start going through the traffic cams?"

* * *

"Guys." Quinn suddenly said. "So I hacked into all five of Charlie's email accounts and I found this. At 9:18 am today he sent an email with no title or content to this email address, which doesn't seem to exist. Then he deleted the email from his sent box."

I leaned in to see the screen. "What address?"

"This one." Quinn pointed to it.

"Huh. That's my NSA email – one of my NSA emails. May I?" Quinn pushed her laptop over to me. Logging into my account, I opened the first email without a title line. Clicking open the attachment, a PDF file displaying a good 30 lines of tiny numbers popped into view on the screen.

"Wow." Marcus said from behind me. Huck poked his big round head in to see.

"So?" Quinn looked at me, hopeful.

I shook my head. "I have no idea. I guess it's some sort of code?"

Huck was staring at the numbers intently, as if willing them to reveal some pattern on their own. There were no spaces, no punctuations, no nothing. Just lines and lines of numbers. "There are a lot of ones." He said eventually. And it was true; there _were_ a lot of ones.

"And this Charlie thought these numbers are worth dying over." Marcus remarked. Our two IT geniuses shot him a look.

"Give me some time." Huck muttered, starting to type on the laptop. Quinn looked at me pointedly.

"Jake, just what on earth were you and Charlie working on?"


End file.
